Cataracts are the most common cause of blindness worldwide, and the best treatment now is surgery. In a vision study published in the British "Nature" magazine, Chinese and American research teams demonstrated a new treatment method that can improve the lens transparency of dogs with cataracts through a kind of eye drops. This is the first step towards drug treatment of cataracts.
There is a tissue in the human eye called the lens. Under normal circumstances, it is transparent to clearly see the outside world. The metabolic disorder of the lens caused by various reasons leads to the denaturation of lens protein and turbidity, which changes from transparent to opaque, blocking light Into the eye, it is cataract. The cause of the disease may be aging, genetics, nutritional disorders, immune and metabolic abnormalities, or trauma, poisoning, radiation, etc. Currently, the best way to treat cataracts is surgery. Drug therapy has no definite effect or is considered to be of no practical significance. It has been in the exploratory research stage at home and abroad.
This time, a joint research team composed of Sichuan University, Sun Yat-sen University, and the University of California, San Diego used eye drops containing lanosterol for dogs with non-traumatic cataracts. Lanosterol is a small molecule found in healthy crystals. Researcher Zhang Kang and his team found that after 6 weeks of treatment, the opacity of the subject's lens was reduced, and the severity of the cataract was also reduced. Researchers have had similar effects on the treatment of rabbit cataract lenses. New research reveals the ophthalmic therapeutic potential of lanosterol.
This study originated from an investigation by the research team: after the researchers analyzed two families with a genetic history of cataracts, they found that they carried a genetic variation, and this variation happened to a gene responsible for the production of lanosterol. The molecule of the normal version of lanosterol helps prevent the proteins that cause cataracts from clumping together, as the research team confirmed this with cell culture models and other experiments. The abnormal version of lanosterol found in the eyes of these family members does not have this effect, which reveals why these family members suffer from cataracts.